OUR TRANS JOURNEY

Project Title // Our Trans Journey

Keywords //Service Design // Entrepreneurship // Start-Up

Time & Location // June-December 2017 // University of the Arts London, London College of Communication

Our Trans Journey is an innovative service start-up for transgender people and partners in United Kingdom. The service aims to create and optimise value in the transition journey for partners of trans people focusing on the phase of social transition.

The transgender transition journey is complex, stressful and emotionally ambivalent. The transition journey often focuses solely on the trans person; however, there is often a crucial additional stakeholder involved that the external network and service providers tend to forget: the partner. There is often a partner supporting the trans person and additionally trying to navigate the complex transition journey. The partners encounter pain points such as anger and a lack of acceptance, a limited vocabulary, loneliness, grief, abuse, some split up – and others become the couple’s communicator or even defender. The lack of acceptance and ‘normalisation’ (this wording was suggested by research and design participants) around being transgender exists on a societal and on an individual level. The lack of acceptance and ‘normalisation’ are symptoms of a core problem concerning a lack of knowledge, understanding and limited vocabulary.

The Empathy Puzzle is a playful and tangible conversational tool provided by Our Trans Journey. The puzzle caters to user values and needs concerning enabling communication and resource sharing; involving tangible touchpoints; offering temporal narratives without being linear; being empathic and playful; bridging between the trans minority and the rest of society. The Empathy Puzzle bridges for empathic and playful conversation between trans people and additional stakeholders.